


Starry Pain

by MegumitheGreat



Category: Tales of Zestiria
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, One Shot, Self-Indulgent, Unrequited Love, mutual love, star tear disease
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:47:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27917725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MegumitheGreat/pseuds/MegumitheGreat
Summary: Dezel loves Rose and tries to communicate it, but hearing that Rose is to marry Prince Konan, he develops Star Tear Disease
Relationships: Dezel/Rose (Tales of Zestiria)
Kudos: 3





	Starry Pain

**Author's Note:**

> Written on a whim after talking with a friend about Star Tear Disease and Hanahaki again. Meant to help me get back to writing.

How long had he felt the way he did? Gazing at the red-haired girl whose fiery personality set hearts ablaze the way he did, he never realized that it was full of love. He was a young seraph some hundred years old, and she was a human about eighteen years old. He wasn’t sure what to think about their different selves, but Dezel knew that Rose was something special. She wasn’t a girl that could be tamed and forced to live the domestic life of a wife. She was a fleeting spirit as free as the wind he felt comb through his hair. Even though he could control it, he rarely ever did unless to protect those he cherished. When it came to Rose, he let her believe she was the indominable will that commanded the wind.

Dezel’s confidant was Lafarga, an older brother-like wind seraph that travelled with the Scattered Bones. Some days he would ask him about how he came to follow the guild of assassins, other days he asked more about Rose. He knew her, didn’t he? So surely, he could spare some details.

“You really are smitten with her, aren’t you?” Lafarga laughed.

“She’s beautiful but spritely—I can’t help but wonder more about her every day,” Dezel dreamily said. “I…I want to tell her how I feel, but…”

“Right, humans can’t see us seraphim.” Lafarga crossed his arms, the long clump of hair on his back swaying as he turned his head to watch Rose train with others in her guild. “It’s almost a curse.”

“I have to do something, though! I…I think I really do l-love her. It’s not normal to fall in love with a human.”

“Well, it certainly happens more often than you think.” Lafarga smiled at him.

He wrung his wrist in a small circle, and a few second later a swirling gust brushed over the humans they protected. Then he looked at Dezel, his hazel eyes shining. Dezel couldn’t touch or embrace Rose, but he could show her affection with the wind. Mimicking his senior’s movements, Dezel called a tiny gust—smaller and delicate like a pixie. It gently tussled Rose’s hair, though it seemed to have annoyed her from where he stood by a shady tree.

“Did I do it wrong?!” Dezel gasped.

“No, I think she was getting ready to spring a trap and got distracted,” Lafarga laughed louder.

Dezel spent his days practicing how to gently kiss her hair with a light breeze. He picked up flower petals and dandelion seeds when she was near, dead leaves when she wasn’t. He kept trying and trying to impress her, and soon enough the older men in the guild began to tease her that every time she stood next to a meadow or a patch of flowers, she’d command the wind to give her a grand entrance.

It was then that Dezel decided that he was making a mistake. He took his wind farther from the guild to practice. Deep into the night, his gusts carried grasses and dust, and when his eyes started to get irritated and itch, he thought that maybe he was getting too carried away with his training. He reduced how much he was blowing his wind, but the itchiness remained. He asked Lafarga to look for anything that might have gotten caught in his eyes, but the wind seraph didn’t find even a spec of dirt. All he noted was that his eyes were red from rubbing and scratching at them.

Perhaps he was kicking up pollen? The Scattered Bones tended to stay in places with lots of trees and bushes that maybe he was just constantly stuck in a cloud of pollen. So, he used his wind to blow it away, yet still his eyes bothered him. Even at night, Dezel did everything he could to make the irritation stop. One night just before morning, he couldn’t stand it anymore. He went to a small creek, gathered the crystal-clear water in the pits of the palms of his hands, raised it to his face, and rinsed them out. Instead of the cooling fluidity of a deep cleanse and a new clarity with which to look at Rose, his eyes burned and ached.

He knew better than to let out a scream. Lafarga would worry. Hellions would come searching for fresh meat. He bottled it up, and as he pulled his leather-gloved hands from his face, he saw crystals the size of sand grains sticking to them. They glittered in the sun that just broke over the horizon.

“W-What the hell is this…?” he whispered.

Despite his eyes still stinging him and continuing to do so throughout the day. He kept quiet about it from Lafarga, taking the time to be alone to observe this strange phenomenon. On his own, the pain was somewhat less noticeable, but when he stared at Rose or even glanced at her, his eyes stung. Dezel began to hide his beautiful peridot eyes with his hair for fear that his friend and brother-in-arms would see the tiny crystals forming on the edge of his eyes like horrendous scabs.

“You changed your hair?” he instantly asked him.

“I figured that if I could make myself appear to Rose, she would think I look cool,” Dezel lied.

“No girl would think this looks good.”

Probably not, but he didn’t want him to know the truth. But soon, it became hard to hide. That same night that Dezel had changed his hair, he approached Rose and her adoptive family. That was right, he had learned that Rose was taken in by the guild after her village had been slaughtered. How he wished he could have held her and lulled her to sleep on the nights she dreamt of the massacre. He wanted to be the one to ease her broken heart. Then he heard it.

“You really like that Prince Konan, don’t you?” someone had asked her.

“Yeah, he’s so dreamy!” Rose cooed over a bowl of stew. “All the girls in Pendrago swoon for him, and they’re all so pretty—but to think that he would ask to marry me!”

“Marry…?” Dezel repeated the unfamiliar word, rolled it on his tongue and let it drop from his lips. “What do you mean by that?”

“When’s the wedding?” another guild member asked.

“I think he said he wanted to get married as soon as possible,” Rose replied with a wide shining grin.

“W-What?” Dezel choked. “N-No…”

“Do you have a dress yet? No? Aw, we’ve got to head back into town and get one!”

“Three cheers for our Rosie!”

“Hip-hip-hooray! Hip-hip-hooray! Hip-hip-hooray!”

The men howled and celebrated for Rose’s engagement, but to Dezel, it was nothing more than the screams and cries of his beating heart echoing in his ears. Lafarga, who had been listening from the tree, tried to catch his junior to console him only for him to be passed.

Using the wind to push him faster and faster, Dezel sped deep into Mallory. His voice swelled in his throat and when he was finally far away from the party and anyone else that could listen, he let out a wail. He clutched his chest, fell to his knees, bawling into the dirt. Tears flowed from his burning eyes that he couldn’t help but shut tight from the pain. They hurt so horribly, something like shards of glass pricking and stabbing all over them. When he opened them, he found that his tears weren’t soaking into the ground. They weren’t even liquid. Before his knees, tiny stars shined and glittered, and if he wanted to, he could have picked them up. The tears didn’t stop, but his sobs did. And he heard them. His tears that streamed down his cheeks and solidified into the crystal-like stars twinkled audibly like thousands of tiny gnats all smacking the sides of a jar. They were full of color, and in the darkness of the night, he didn’t realize that the world around him appeared in only shades of grey. If only he could see the color of the stars around him, all of which painted the ground with the yellows of his happiness and blues of his sorrow and reds of his anger and greens of his envy for Prince Konan; he would have realized that the unrequited love that he had for Rose would never be returned. She didn’t know he existed. He couldn’t show himself before her. And he cried more. The crystals grew over his eyes, completely obscuring his view of the world.

In his desperation for the pain to stop, he clawed at his eyes. He scraped and chipped away at the crystals that took away his sight when it struck him that now there was nothing he could see. He couldn’t watch Rose anymore. Not in her entirety. With his wind, he only knew shapes and forms but no finer details like her smile and sparkling eyes.

Even when Dezel lost everything and his blessing turned into a curse, he stayed by Rose’s shadow. After forming the pact with Lailah and Sorey, for the first time, Rose saw him and the remnants of the crystals that scarred him. Seeing the greyed eyes that had been shielded from light and love, she felt sorry for him.

“Can you really not see anything?” she asked him one night in Marlind while on a walk. Of course, Dezel didn’t answer her. He wasn’t used to this, even from the girl he had loved for so long. “I guess you can’t. I asked Edna about it. She said it’s called Star Tear Disease. It comes when you have unrequited feelings for someone, and the only way the crystals go away is when those feelings are returned. The crystals will go away, but your sight won’t come back.”

“It’s fine if I can’t see,” he replied.

“I guess since you have your window, but I’ve been curious. Who did you love that didn’t love you back?”

“Someone that didn’t know I existed. Don’t worry about it.”

“Well, whoever they were, they’re garbage!” Rose happily clung to Dezel’s arm. “You’re still prickly, but if someone broke your heart, then it’ll be my job to put it back together!”

“D-Don’t say stupid things like that!” Dezel said more embarrassed than angry. He turned away from her, but he didn’t pull his arm out of her grasp. It could make thing worse again.

“But I’m serious! You’ve been around all this time living with that disease, and…well…maybe I’ve got a soft spot for you.”

“Rose, you don’t have to do this.”

The show of kindness was so unnatural now. He was used to her being oblivious to him and how he felted, but this soft spot that she had developed couldn’t be real. Ever the porcupine, he prickled at the thought that she could love him back after all that time. He turned away from her. It was better to just go on like before. His eyes hurt, but he was used to it now.

Fingers snaked into his and wrapped around his palm, giving it a tight squeeze just before they held him back from walking further. “Dezel, it’s my fault because I never knew, isn’t it?” Rose asked him with a sincerely smile, a rarity even for someone like her. “I want to fix it. I want to help you heal from it. Maybe then, you’ll be able to see again!”

Dezel sighed. There wasn’t anything that could be done for his ability to see; besides, five years was a long time for his eyes to stop working and for the crystal to harden and grow like a giant scab. He knew that if he didn’t take her up on her wish to help him, she would eventually meet the same fate. He cared for her as much as she did for him. He didn’t want her to suffer like he was now.

“You know, even if we have mutual feelings, it won’t bring my sight back,” he told her.

“Yeah…Edna said that, too. But even if you can’t see, I’ll be there! I’ll stay by your side and be your eyes.”

“Uh, I can just read the wind.”

“Oh, come on. I’m trying to be romantic, killjoy!” Then Rose let out a laugh that eventually quieted down into just a tiny sob. “It’s still my fault, and you’ve always protected me. Let me do the same for you.”

Dezel silently took some solace in Rose clinging to his arm. He was happy that she wanted to help, but if it was going to fix anything, he had to know:  
“Rose, do you…love…me?”

Her grip tightened around his arm. The crystal around his eyes began to crack. “Now that I can see you, I know for certain that I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> It's not super great just because this last week of school has really hurt me mentally. But it's still a decent little story.


End file.
